There’s something about art that convinces us to explore it. You know you are looking at a piece of art when you have to stop and think about what you are looking at, and when that thinking draws you magnetically to want to know more. My earliest experience with the power that art has over us in this way was when I took my mother to a museum in Raleigh, North Carolina.

We were walking through one of the exhibition rooms and she noticed a painting that was very brightly-colored and absolutely saturated with thick swabs of oil paint. She walked over the painting and began to peel at the flakes of paint. I was startled. I didn’t understand why she was doing this. My mother had no cognitive defects. She was at the time always pretty stable in her thinking. But I wondered at her absolute lack of impulse control.

Of course, on reflection, I can see that this was the beginning of my mother’s mental decline, a sad fact that I have had to slowly and deliberately come to terms with, but it was also a representation of how art almost begs us to turn it into something tangible.

Art is an object that takes the stale symbols of our society -- our private and public discourse -- and rejuvenates it by beckoning us to re-ignite the collisions and conflicts of ideas and surface level affections that make us human. My mother, quite innocently, under no desire to cause harm, felt magnetically and molecularly attracted to art. To literally peel it back and find out what is behind the surface of it.

I was reminded of this story when I saw that two Phunk developers / artists who belong to the Capsule21 art collective have collaborated to produce an onchain art and smart contract project called Clickbait, to explore the “mutability” and “malleability” of color representations and relationships found in the in the CryptoPunk hexadecimal color palette.

The top 50 colors in the CryptoPunks were first shared by Middlemarch a few months ago, on Twitter. That list looks like this visually:

If you have been reading my art writing, and are familiar with my ongoing attempt to write a book about onchain art, you will know that members of this Capsule21 collective have taken a very different approach to blockchain art over the past nearly one year. They are jovially fanatical obsessives about CryptoPunk (and other) onchain and offchain “blockchain” art projects. They make characters for an entire book on their own, but I digress.

Instead of minting out PFP rug pulls, artists like Piv and Middlemarch take literally the question, “What does an NFT do?”

They try to invent ways to urge minters and viewers of art to actually interact with the blockchain. For, it is in interacting with the blockchain that we really begin to “see” and “feel” the art.

[You can read my notes here, here, here, and here, about what this means for art. The notes are all early notes on future chapters of “Hidden Renaissance,” the book I am writing about art on the blockchain. And you can reserve the St. Choppio book token, to have access to that story and the different ways I will be telling it around October.]

So, Clickbait, which is not its first name. It was originally called CryptoSquares, and its purpose was to show how colors taken out of their context take on different meanings.

A collector called PunkHunter was shown some early work from this series and his comment was simply: “Clickbait.” So “Clickbait” became its name.

Clickbait is a game of color and chance. It provokes concentration on color by re-assigning the colors of a CryptoPunk into a composition of layered squares

These color squares are reconstitutions of Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square project squares, which he worked on for at least two decades. Like Piv and Middlemarch, Albers has a healthy obsession about the intricacies of the existence of things. For Albers, this was color, or rather, how color is made and manufactured and then achieves new context and meaning when composed into an object of aesthetic value. As you do.

Piv and Middlemarch were inspired by this obsession and then designed 10,000 generative squares that assemble the colors of a random punk into a layered square of colors.

When you mint the color square, the smart contract creates a two-layered PNG file that enables you to click on the square and reveal the punk that it was designed from, which lies underneath the square.

You can do this yourself on OpenSea, but here is CLICKBAIT #6 before clicking:

From Piv’s one-sheet description of the project, which I don’t think is published anywhere, yet, but which I have reviewed: “All 220 CryptoPunk colors are combined in an abstract composition, an unvarying square format, allowing the viewer to concentrate on the countless variations in the discourse of CryptoPunk colors. In fact, there are about 2.3 billion possible combinations.”

What Piv and Middlemarch are doing is showing that when you put all of these color combinations together into their random assignments, and assemble them as punks, it is hard to see that the unique characteristics of the colors individually. Their qualities work together to formulate the object body of a punk, or one of its traits.

The color only has that meaning within the context of the punk. But when you mint a color square, you are first shown just the composition square. The colors lose all meaning and context. You click on the color square and you find out where the colors get their essence.

In the funny way that blockchain has, there’s a slight anthropomorphic thrill to this. Oh! The color comes from a beard, and they are all so vivid when they are seen as a square. Some of the colors are occluded when represented as a trait.

Like Clickbait #57, the colors of the bandana on a punk. In one format, it’s a punk. In another format, it’s color. Seen together, clickety-click, and it’s a relationship of meaning.

Piv and Middlemarch show that colors themselves have meaning. And shades of meaning. And that looking at color invites the assignment or projection of meaning. NFTs make it possible to explore multiple facets of this relationship, because they make the representation of color clickable, researchable, ontological. I don’t think there has ever been art like this before.

It’s the art my mother wished existed, so many years ago in the museum in Raleigh.

NFTs Invite Curiosity

Knowing a little of the inspiration behind this project tells us more. In fact, what Piv and Middlemarch are doing with the art and the smart contract are showing a version of what Dovetail is doing when he shows that not all machines or monitors or screen resolutions enable you to see what the artist intended. Randomisation of standards leads to shades of "color meaning.”

When he was about sixty-two, Albers settled on exploring a single format of composition, the square, by nesting together several squares and giving each a different color. He used commercial paints. He discovered that different paints from different manufacturers looked different, even though they shared the same name.

How could this be? Well, the manufacturing processes were not the same. The ingredients were steps darker or lighter. There was no way for there to be an absolutely humanly-created platonic color. Colors were what they were within the context of their making.

By assembling the colors in this way, Albers, in my opinion, began to create a discussion and a reflection on how we take in color and assign it a meaning, or a position on the gradient of truth.

What Art Can Be

I’ve lost my mother to cognitive decline over the years. She is not the same mother she used to be. I don’t share her context. The context I relate to her doesn’t match her way of processing the context. But she’s still the mother that reached out to the painting to understand what she was seeing.

In a way, this was the most natural and pure form of art appreciation. We always like to think that art delivers us an insight; that the power of the artist is such that just by looking at a piece of art we can see the idea.

But in the kind of world we live in, when ideas have grown stale, contexts have been shaped out of our reach, and the blood lines and volcanic exasperations of our ideologies have simmered to a cautious and empty promise, perhaps there is room in this world for art that you can touch. That you can click on.

NFTs have definitely turned into that kind of art concept for me.

I may have lost the mind of my mother, but my mother’s context still lives on in me.

And I think it may be true that it’s this part of her that I take with me through every click that reveals what’s hiding in the art.

There’s something about art that convinces us to explore it. You know you are looking at a piece of art when you have to stop and think about what you are looking at, and when that thinking draws you magnetically to want to know more. My earliest experience with the power that art has over us in this way was when I took my mother to a museum in Raleigh, North Carolina.

We were walking through one of the exhibition rooms and she noticed a painting that was very brightly-colored and absolutely saturated with thick swabs of oil paint. She walked over the painting and began to peel at the flakes of paint. I was startled. I didn’t understand why she was doing this. My mother had no cognitive defects. She was at the time always pretty stable in her thinking. But I wondered at her absolute lack of impulse control.

Of course, on reflection, I can see that this was the beginning of my mother’s mental decline, a sad fact that I have had to slowly and deliberately come to terms with, but it was also a representation of how art almost begs us to turn it into something tangible.

Art is an object that takes the stale symbols of our society -- our private and public discourse -- and rejuvenates it by beckoning us to re-ignite the collisions and conflicts of ideas and surface level affections that make us human. My mother, quite innocently, under no desire to cause harm, felt magnetically and molecularly attracted to art. To literally peel it back and find out what is behind the surface of it.

I was reminded of this story when I saw that two Phunk developers / artists who belong to the Capsule21 art collective have collaborated to produce an onchain art and smart contract project called Clickbait, to explore the “mutability” and “malleability” of color representations and relationships found in the in the CryptoPunk hexadecimal color palette.

The top 50 colors in the CryptoPunks were first shared by Middlemarch a few months ago, on Twitter. That list looks like this visually:

If you have been reading my art writing, and are familiar with my ongoing attempt to write a book about onchain art, you will know that members of this Capsule21 collective have taken a very different approach to blockchain art over the past nearly one year. They are jovially fanatical obsessives about CryptoPunk (and other) onchain and offchain “blockchain” art projects. They make characters for an entire book on their own, but I digress.

Instead of minting out PFP rug pulls, artists like Piv and Middlemarch take literally the question, “What does an NFT do?”

They try to invent ways to urge minters and viewers of art to actually interact with the blockchain. For, it is in interacting with the blockchain that we really begin to “see” and “feel” the art.

[You can read my notes here, here, here, and here, about what this means for art. The notes are all early notes on future chapters of “Hidden Renaissance,” the book I am writing about art on the blockchain. And you can reserve the St. Choppio book token, to have access to that story and the different ways I will be telling it around October.]

So, Clickbait, which is not its first name. It was originally called CryptoSquares, and its purpose was to show how colors taken out of their context take on different meanings.

A collector called PunkHunter was shown some early work from this series and his comment was simply: “Clickbait.” So “Clickbait” became its name.

Clickbait is a game of color and chance. It provokes concentration on color by re-assigning the colors of a CryptoPunk into a composition of layered squares

These color squares are reconstitutions of Josef Albers’ Homage to the Square project squares, which he worked on for at least two decades. Like Piv and Middlemarch, Albers has a healthy obsession about the intricacies of the existence of things. For Albers, this was color, or rather, how color is made and manufactured and then achieves new context and meaning when composed into an object of aesthetic value. As you do.

Piv and Middlemarch were inspired by this obsession and then designed 10,000 generative squares that assemble the colors of a random punk into a layered square of colors.

When you mint the color square, the smart contract creates a two-layered PNG file that enables you to click on the square and reveal the punk that it was designed from, which lies underneath the square.

You can do this yourself on OpenSea, but here is CLICKBAIT #6 before clicking:

From Piv’s one-sheet description of the project, which I don’t think is published anywhere, yet, but which I have reviewed: “All 220 CryptoPunk colors are combined in an abstract composition, an unvarying square format, allowing the viewer to concentrate on the countless variations in the discourse of CryptoPunk colors. In fact, there are about 2.3 billion possible combinations.”

What Piv and Middlemarch are doing is showing that when you put all of these color combinations together into their random assignments, and assemble them as punks, it is hard to see that the unique characteristics of the colors individually. Their qualities work together to formulate the object body of a punk, or one of its traits.

The color only has that meaning within the context of the punk. But when you mint a color square, you are first shown just the composition square. The colors lose all meaning and context. You click on the color square and you find out where the colors get their essence.

In the funny way that blockchain has, there’s a slight anthropomorphic thrill to this. Oh! The color comes from a beard, and they are all so vivid when they are seen as a square. Some of the colors are occluded when represented as a trait.

Like Clickbait #57, the colors of the bandana on a punk. In one format, it’s a punk. In another format, it’s color. Seen together, clickety-click, and it’s a relationship of meaning.

Piv and Middlemarch show that colors themselves have meaning. And shades of meaning. And that looking at color invites the assignment or projection of meaning. NFTs make it possible to explore multiple facets of this relationship, because they make the representation of color clickable, researchable, ontological. I don’t think there has ever been art like this before.

It’s the art my mother wished existed, so many years ago in the museum in Raleigh.

NFTs Invite Curiosity

Knowing a little of the inspiration behind this project tells us more. In fact, what Piv and Middlemarch are doing with the art and the smart contract are showing a version of what Dovetail is doing when he shows that not all machines or monitors or screen resolutions enable you to see what the artist intended. Randomisation of standards leads to shades of "color meaning.”

When he was about sixty-two, Albers settled on exploring a single format of composition, the square, by nesting together several squares and giving each a different color. He used commercial paints. He discovered that different paints from different manufacturers looked different, even though they shared the same name.

How could this be? Well, the manufacturing processes were not the same. The ingredients were steps darker or lighter. There was no way for there to be an absolutely humanly-created platonic color. Colors were what they were within the context of their making.

By assembling the colors in this way, Albers, in my opinion, began to create a discussion and a reflection on how we take in color and assign it a meaning, or a position on the gradient of truth.

What Art Can Be

I’ve lost my mother to cognitive decline over the years. She is not the same mother she used to be. I don’t share her context. The context I relate to her doesn’t match her way of processing the context. But she’s still the mother that reached out to the painting to understand what she was seeing.

In a way, this was the most natural and pure form of art appreciation. We always like to think that art delivers us an insight; that the power of the artist is such that just by looking at a piece of art we can see the idea.

But in the kind of world we live in, when ideas have grown stale, contexts have been shaped out of our reach, and the blood lines and volcanic exasperations of our ideologies have simmered to a cautious and empty promise, perhaps there is room in this world for art that you can touch. That you can click on.

NFTs have definitely turned into that kind of art concept for me.

I may have lost the mind of my mother, but my mother’s context still lives on in me.

And I think it may be true that it’s this part of her that I take with me through every click that reveals what’s hiding in the art.